Buffy Cribbs
Artist’s Statement
From my earliest memory, I knew my happiness lay in “making things” and that’s what I do. I am a “self taught” artist in that I have not attended art school; I have, however been surrounded by art and artists all my life.
Over the years I have worked as a laborer, carpenter, cabinet maker, and mother, and have found that everything we do teaches us something about our art; in fact; art tends to be a concentration of what has gone before. And I believe it represents, in the end, our inner dialogues.
My work deals with the juxtapositions of innocence to knowledge, primitivism to technocracy, youth to experience. I like to set things in motion and observe the tones, resonances and harmonies that result when ideas bump into one another.
So, in my furniture and mixed media work I incorporate found materials (sometimes I manufacture these “found materials”). I use the skills I have developed working in the trades in conjunction with experiences gained from a lifetime of knocking around in the “Art World” (that strange and “other” place). When I’m assembling my pieces, I often imagine that I’m a worker existing in a primitive place, down river from here, assembling the detritus from other cultures as it washes ashore; trying to make sense of clues while making something new and attractive; reassembling the flotsam and jetsam in a way that makes sense to my wit and experience and pays homage to the things I love.
In 1998 I started painting seriously just to enjoy the simplicity of working in two dimensions. I found that the marriage between color and line was irresistible and was seduced by the concept of image as narrative- painting mainly “people doing things” and “portraits of furniture”. In recent years my painting has grown, as attention to certain kinds of detail has led to abstraction of form, while increasing skills lead to more “painterly” painting. I have mostly worked in reverse on acrylic sheet, which leads to an unusual surface and a depth of color and texture I find exciting.